Fired RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal Returns With New Ad Tech Venture

Ad tech veteran Gurbaksh Chahal is back with a new company called Gravity4, after being fired from his previous company RadiumOne in April, after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges in a domestic violence case.

Gravity4′s aim, Chahal says, is to simplify the increasingly complicated process of purchasing online advertising. He’s spent the last three months creating new ad buying technology with the help of engineers and executives formerly of major tech firms including Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft, he said.

“This time around I wanted to take a step back and look at what is wrong with the overall ad market,” Chahal said. “Essentially what we’re doing is cutting out the middlemen and lowering the cost of buying media. We want to make the friction that exists in the industry go away, and make the middlemen go away,” he explained, in reference to the long chains of companies that are often involved with the purchasing and delivery of online advertising

Specifically, Gravity4 is creating data management software and programmatic ad buying technologies to create an ad buying “stack.” It wants advertisers to see it as a one-stop shop for their online ad buying needs, and an alternative to stitching together technologies from various different ad tech vendors.

It remains to be seen whether Chahal’s misdemeanor charges and his ousting at RadiumOne might affect his new company. After his firing from RadiumOne he told WSJ he was “innocent from the get-go,” and that he agreed to plead guilty to the misdemeanors to satisfy the company’s board.

On Friday he said his misdemeanor plea and departure from RadiumOne have been misrepresented by chatter on social networking sites and by articles published by media outlets. “The truth hasn’t really been out there,” he said.

Separately, on Monday, Chahal and RadiumOne issued a joint statement they said “reflects an agreement between RadiumOne and Gurbaksh Chahal to bring an end to all disputes they have had.”

The statement included an acknowledgement that RadiumOne board members “supported Gurbaksh’s decision to accept a misdemeanor plea instead of continuing the long court process for full acquittal for the sake of the company, its employees, and its customers.”

RadiumOne declined to comment further on its relationship with Chahal.

Gravity4 already counts major agencies and Fortune 500 companies as clients, and will reach profitability by the third quarter of this year, according to Chahal. “I’ve been in the industry long enough to quickly on-board some clients,” he said.

Chahal first announced Gravity4 with a blog post on social networking site LinkedIn on Friday. “Over the years I have faced and overcome numerous challenges. But nothing like those I have experienced this past year. Even in my darkest moments, however, I never had any doubt that it was all part of my journey. There was a purpose behind the ordeal—and that was to lead me to the creation of Gravity4,” the blog post read.

Prior to Gravity4 and RadiumOne, Chahal also founded internet advertising companies ClickAgents and BlueLithium, which were acquired by ValueClick and Yahoo, respectively.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Gravity4 currently employs 50 people, but plans to open offices in New York and Chicago by the end of the year. So far the company is entirely self-funded, Chahal said, and it does not currently plan to take any outside investment.

It doesn’t plan to make any acquisitions, either.

“I’m a big fan of building,” Chahal said. “Sometimes if you acquire something you get organ rejection; it just doesn’t work. We have a great group of engineers so we’ll be able to build an end-to-end stack on a continual basis,” he concluded.